Full transcript of the episode (it gives away every surprise)
Interactive experiment
A perception experiment
You are taking part in a short experiment with five other people, online at the same time as you. In each round, say which line is the same length as the reference line. The others answer before you.
Six rounds: each time, three lines A, B and C, and a reference line. Five “participants” answer before the reader. Three times, they all give the same, obviously wrong answer. The number of times the reader follows them is counted.
The five other participants don’t exist.
They were programmed to give an obviously wrong answer, three times. To see whether you would follow them.
The Sixth Subject
A group can make you doubt your own eyes. A single ally is enough to set you free.
1951, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. The psychologist Solomon Asch gathers seven to nine students around a table. All of them are his accomplices, except one, seated near the end of the row.
On the rigged trials, the accomplices give the same wrong answer out loud. On average, the real participant goes along with the group one time in three. Three-quarters give in at least once.
Asch wanted to show that we resist group pressure when the evidence is right in front of us. He discovered the opposite.
Alone behind a screen, facing invisible strangers, the pressure is much weaker than under the gaze of six people sitting next to you. And yet it exists.
Asch also found the antidote. All it takes is a single accomplice giving the right answer for almost everyone to dare give it too: conformity drops to about 5%.
A single ally is enough.
If you are the first to say what you see, you free everyone else.
Interactive experiment
Hamburg, June 13, 1936
At the launch of a ship, hundreds of workers give the Nazi salute. One man doesn’t. Find him.
In a famous 1936 photograph, hundreds of workers at a Hamburg shipyard give the Nazi salute; in the center, slightly to the right, one man keeps his arms folded. The reader has to find him.
He is most often identified as August Landmesser. A former member of the Nazi Party, he had been expelled from it because he had gotten engaged to a Jewish woman, Irma Eckler. The racial laws forbade them to marry.
Irma died in 1942, in an extermination center. August, sent to a penal battalion, went missing at the front in 1944. In the photo, he has no ally. He refuses to salute anyway.
Question for the reader
A scientist in a gray lab coat asks you to give a stranger stronger and stronger electric shocks, each time he makes a mistake on a memory test. The stranger screams, begs, then falls silent. How far would you go?
26 people out of 40 went all the way: 450 volts.
Before the experiment, Stanley Milgram had asked psychiatrists to predict the result. Their estimate: roughly one person in a thousand.
The shocks were fake: the “learner” was an actor. But the participants didn’t know that. Many trembled, laughed nervously, begged for it to stop… and went on, because a calm voice kept repeating: “The experiment requires that you continue.”
The experiment has since been examined in detail. The archives show that the experimenter sometimes improvised, and that some participants doubted the shocks were real. But in 2009, an ethical replication, stopped at 150 volts, still found 70% of participants willing to go further.
Question for the reader
And the Stanford prison experiment? In 1971, students played guards and prisoners; within six days, the story goes, the guards turned sadistic. What does this famous experiment prove?
- That the role makes the torturer
- Not much (correct answer)
If you answer “That the role makes the torturer”:
Not much, unfortunately.
If you answer “Not much”:
Well spotted.
It was largely staged.
The guards had been told to be tough, and one prisoner’s “breakdown” was, by his own admission, an act so he could leave. Thibault Le Texier showed this in 2018, with the archives to back it up.
The lesson is not “science gets things wrong.” It is: science corrects itself. A famous experiment is not a true experiment; it becomes one when others redo it, and find the same thing.
March 13, 1964, New York. Kitty Genovese, 28, is stabbed on her way home. Two weeks later, The New York Times claims that thirty-eight neighbors watched the murder, and that none of them called the police.
The story goes around the world. It inspires famous experiments on the “bystander effect”: the more witnesses there are, the less responsible each one feels for acting.
The thirty-eight indifferent witnesses never existed.
Only a few neighbors had understood what was happening, and some of them did call the police. One neighbor, Sophia Farrar, went down to the stairwell where Kitty lay. Kitty died in her arms.
In 2019, researchers analyzed 219 arguments caught on security cameras in Amsterdam, Lancaster and Cape Town. In nine cases out of ten, at least one person intervened. And the more witnesses there were, the more likely it was that someone would act.
You are less alone than you think.
Conformity. The tendency to bring our judgments into line with the group’s, to be accepted or because we assume the group knows. A single ally is often enough to break it.
Groups can blind us, or make us heroic. But one question remains: why do we cooperate, when betrayal would pay more? The most moving answer was played out in a trench, one Christmas night.
Sources
- Solomon Asch, “Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments,” 1951; “Studies of independence and conformity,” Psychological Monographs, 1956.
- Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral study of obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963; Obedience to Authority, 1974.
- Gina Perry, Behind the Shock Machine, 2012; Jerry Burger, “Replicating Milgram,” American Psychologist, 2009.
- Thibault Le Texier, Histoire d’un mensonge. Enquête sur l’expérience de Stanford, 2018; “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment,” American Psychologist, 2019.
- John Darley and Bibb Latané, “Bystander intervention in emergencies,” 1968; The New York Times, 1964 and 2016.
- Richard Philpot et al., “Would I be helped? Cross-national CCTV footage shows that intervention is the norm in public conflicts,” American Psychologist, 2020.